Book of Mutter & Appendix Project bundle
£20.00
Kate Zambreno
Bundle of 2 Kate Zambreno Books: Book of Mutter & Appendix Project
Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.
Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.
Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.
‘Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.’ – Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
Book of Mutter and Appendix Project can also be purchased separately for £12 each.
Description
Bundle of 2 Kate Zambreno Books: Book of Mutter & Appendix Project
Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.
Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.
‘Kate Zambreno’s Appendix Project and Book of Mutter are meditations on grief, motherhood, and memory alongside and through Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. These are also books about reading and seeing. To enter them is to be in the company of a writer with a tremendous capacity and gift for questioning, thinking, and feeling. These are extraordinary works.’ – Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
Kate Zambreno is the author of ten books, most recently The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, published in the UK by Corsair, along with a reissue of their seminal text Heroines. Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar, under The Committee to Investigate Atmosphere, was recently published by Columbia University Press. Forthcoming is Animal Studies, a book of zoos and Kafka, as part of the Undelivered Lectures series at Transit Books. They are a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction. Book of Mutter and its companion text of lectures, Appendix Project, are being reissued together by Prototype. Zambreno is at work on a series of books, Realisms, circling around precarity and interiors.
